ADIRONDACKS IN THE SPRING 1971
May 21 - 23, 1971
FRIDAY, MAY 21: Ride 7AM-2PM, to Castle Rock; canoe with Arnie, Norma, and John riding.
SATURDAY, MAY 22: EARTHQUAKE! To Chimney Mountain and toward Puffer Pond. Read "The Great Explosion."
SUNDAY, MAY 23: Sun on Cedar River Flow; type 5; Joan's party.
MAY 21 notes: The Hudson River seemed to be overflowing its narrow banks, and then we heard about the thunderstorm yesterday that wiped out many sections of the road between Blue Mountain Lake and Long Lake, necessitating a 90-mile drive to replace the 11-mile drive, and we went out to see what the damage was, to find one section already filled in with sand, but another section was like a three-foot-wide macadam tightrope over buckled edges and pitted sandy soil down to angry gullies ten feet below the road. Beyond that, where they hadn't bothered to clear, the path of the water across the road was traced with pebbles, sand, and rocks up to a foot across which had been swept across the road before the road fell. A bulldozer clanked and snorted in one gully, breaking up chunks of blacktop so that the area could be filled, and I wandered further up the road to see where the parking lot of the Adirondack Museum had been eroded so that logs demarking the end of the parking lot had tumbled into the water-caused ravine, and some houses in the valley looked lucky to have outlived the coursing waters. One porch near the road hung out over nothing, and a few more feet out of the earth bank would have caused it to topple into the waters. Arnie spoke to a girl who said there was no one grand noise, just a steady erosion through a night with no sleep as the rain poured down, and, aided by the spring runoff, ate the road away in looping dollops. Sluices of water still ran in the gullies to the side, and white-painted fence posts were strung like trapped birds along the wires of the side fences. Back down to the car to enjoy driving through the hills, where Snowy Mountain, among others, still had gashes of snow marking its sides, and we came upon fields of snow in a couple of places, notable in the ice cave region of Chimney Mountain, which we didn't bother to investigate, but we even saw it along the way to Castle Rock, and even under the eaves at Hemlock Hall. Here there were no willows to shock the eye with the brightness of their early yellow green, but still some of the maples were only fringed with red as the early leaves only now started blooming from under their winter pods. Views over the mountains were breathtakingly smoky in delicate hues, as some of the trees retained their winter gray-tips, some were fringed in the bright maple-red, and others were blossoming out in varying shades of green that stood out in patches like earth-caught clouds on the hillsides. All the streams were full to overflowing, and in some places fields were bog-muddy with running water, and the path became a bubbly torrent which we had to circumvent by walking around the trees at the sides of the paths. We seemed to see a large number of animals, too, from two orange salamanders which we stopped to pick up each time, to two deer that we startled on Sunday driving into Cedar River, to the porcupine Norma spotted when Arnie and John had passed it, hunkering through the underbrush confident of its defenses against anyone who came too near, to the scarlet tanager and red-winged woodpecker and robins and cardinals in the trees, to the fish jumping in the waters, and the raccoons we saw dead on the roads. But it might have been still too early in the spring to enjoy the combination of early-season treats: the thinness of the foliage which allowed us to SEE what was on the other sides of banks of trees, and the brightness of colors of the newly minted yellow and green leaves. From every corner of the road, particularly when there were patches of sun, we remarked about the delicacy of the new, rich colors, particularly when contrasted with the old darker greens of the evergreen, or the white-gray colors of the rocks, which sometimes reflected in the sun because of the melting snows' waters running over them. But we didn't get much in the line of sunsets, the Friday's being concealed in clouds far to the north, and the Saturday's being in a cloudless sky which only reddened and didn't turn all sorts of colors. But the roads were almost empty, there was plenty of room in the dining room once the wedding party had been taken care of, and the cabins didn't have a smoky smell from a long summer of fires in the fireplace, and the stack of firewood underneath was new, also, as we raided it for fire after glorious fire. And, a week later, I begin softly peeling from the sun on Sunday.